This invention relates to an audio output device and more particularly to an audio output device suitable for an electronic translator which provides a verbal output of a translated word or sentence, a talking timepiece which provides a verbal alarm when updated time reaches a time setting and so forth.
Conventional speech synthesizing for an electronic translator or timepiece is achieved by analyzing humam voices, effecting information compression, loading thousands of pieces of voice information into a ROM and synthesizing human voices through the associated pieces of the voice information fetched from the ROM. Although these devices are capable of pronouncing a considerable number of words or phrases with a memory of a relatively small capacity, it is obvious that the number of outputtable words or phrases is inevitably limited because the voice information is stored in a fixed or permament fashion in the memory. In particular, it is impossible to synthesize proper nouns such as personal names because they are not stored in the memory in advance. It is therefore impossible to output an audio message including such a proper noun when alarm setting is reached.
The audio output device will be increasingly used in electronic translators and talking timepieces if words with a very low frequency of occurrence such as proper nouns may be easily audibly outputted.